Vegan World 2026

Vegan World 2026!

What would a Vegan World, implementing the vision of an eco-centric, life-enriching culture of normalized nonviolence, be like? As Vegans, if we are opposed to oppressing animals of any kind, then surely we would be opposed to oppressing people of any kind either. Therefore, in such a Vegan World, there would be neither child labor for conflict minerals and cocoa production nor slave labor for tomato picking and strawberry picking.

Many questions arise as a consequence of this observation:

1. How would we organize such a human society so that we have a functioning economy that caters to the needs of the people even as it nurtures all Life on Earth?

2. How would we create fulfilling, meaningful, purposeful lives for ourselves?

Indeed, it is clear that a Vegan World of the Imaginal Cells would be nothing like the Caterpillar's world that we inhabit today. Listed below is a set of characteristics that we can expect to shift as we evolve. However, please note that these are not meant to be all or nothing transitions. For instance, the current economy is not entirely transaction-based as the work that a mother does for her child is part of an informal gift economy even today. Likewise, a Vegan world is not going to be entirely a gift economy either, but we can expect the gift economy to be more prominent than the transaction economy.

Given that caveat, here are some of the transitions we envision. If you would like to add or amend this list, please feel free to contact us.

Political Principles:

Since the environmental situation on Earth calls for our transition to a Vegan World in just 8 great years from now, by 2026, we should be putting our heads together to ponder these questions ASAP! In collaboration with Prof. Lisa Barca of Barrett Honors College at Arizona State University, Climate Healers is organizing Vegan World 2026!Conference, not to answer these questions, but to develop strategic plans for accelerating these transitions and to brainstorm deeper questions as we examine these transitions in greater detail so that we can ruminate over and brainstorm again and again.

Some Background

Historically, every momentous transformation in human civilization has been accompanied by revolutionary changes in three aspects of human lives, 1) In the way we harness energy;2) In the way we communicate with each other; and3) In the foods we eat.

About 200,000 years ago, we1) Discovered the controlled use of fire;2) Developed spoken language to communicate with each other; and3) Began eating meat from hunted animals because our controlled use of fire allowed us to cook that meat and made it digestible.

Thus began the dominance of patriarchy as the male hunters assumed more importance than the female gatherers in human societies. The gatherers no longer had to forage over large distances to gather the nutrition needed for human sustenance since the hunters could provide concentrated nutrition in the form of animal flesh. Simultaneously, this strengthened speciesist attitudes within human societies, as animals became objects to be killed for human consumption. Thus sexism and speciesism are the core oppressions from which all other oppressions sprung over time. Hierarchy developed within the patriarchy. The victims of sexist oppression, the women, were partly assuaged when they could oppress other species and feel superior to them.

About 10,000 years ago, during the agricultural revolution, we1) Harnessed the energy of animals such as cows, buffaloes and horses to plough our fields;2) Developed writing in order to communicate with each other; and3) Grew crops of our own liking instead of relying on what Nature provided in the wild.

Instead of humans belonging to Nature, we began acting as if Nature belonged to humans. Not only did we enslave work animals to do our bidding, we enslaved the Earth to produce what we desired. In the resulting agricultural revolution, cities were born where the ruling classes did not do the actual work of raising crops but were fed very well. The social hierarchies developed more layers, resulting in other oppressions such as slavery, classism and casteism.

About 200 years ago, we1) Began to harness fossil fuels for energy;2) Developed the printing press for communication, to disseminate information far more efficiently than with just hand written documents; and3) Repurposed our domesticated work animals to be raised as just food animals.

We developed machines to plough the fields and didn't need the work animals anymore for that purpose, but we continued to enslave them anyway just to milk them and eat them. We developed further layers of hierarchy in our social structures to expand the scope of our human enterprise until it bestrode the whole globe, conquering and colonizing any indigenous civilizations that came in our way. The fossil fuels were to be found in specific locations on Earth and we had to create refining, processing and distribution systems for them. The food animals were most efficiently raised in giant factories as if they were widgets, and then processed into meat packages, refrigerated and distributed to the consumers up and down the social hierarchies. A dominant financial sector arose that siphoned off increasingly larger shares of the wealth, simply as a commission for allocating capital efficiently. Oppressions such as colonialism and racism became much more prominent.

Today, we are poised to undergo yet another transformation, the greatest of them all! This time:1) We are harnessing solar energy directly and rather than being concentrated in a few locations, it is actually falling on our heads almost everywhere. Using battery storage and DC Grid technology, we can eliminate conversion losses and stop relying on large-scale energy producers and make our energy infrastructure truly distributed.2) We are using the Internet to communicate with each other and it has put the entire accumulated knowledge of all humanity at each and every finger tip. By using peer-to-peer networking Holochain technology, we can free ourselves from the centralized, dominant players such as Google and Facebook, who are currently controlling which part of the accumulated knowledge of humanity each individual gets to see.3) We are transitioning out of animal-based foods to plant-based Vegan foods, which can mostly be grown in local, organic farms without having to rely on the chemical industry or large animal husbandry operations with giant processing, refrigeration and distribution systems that are currently spread out over half the globe.

Unlike the previous three major transformations that increasingly concentrated power in the hands of a few and strengthened the social hierarchy, what is occurring today is an entirely radical kind of transformation since all three changes devolve power to the local level, where it becomes easier to implement cooperative and consensual decision-making processes.